


Vices

by Jacqueline Albright-Beckett (xaandria)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Pre-pilot, Smoking, TW: drug use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-17
Updated: 2013-08-17
Packaged: 2017-12-23 18:54:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/929909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xaandria/pseuds/Jacqueline%20Albright-Beckett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean knows how easy it is for him to sink into his vices and coping mechanisms. He should be better than this. He needs to be better than this, if he's going to get Dad back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vices

Dean tried his first cigarette at the age of thirteen.

It was behind the bleachers at the fourth middle school he’d attended that year. Her name was Natasha Morgan. She’d pulled the wrinkled pack of Marlboros from her backpack and held them up, a little too casually for it to be commonplace, and Dean had shrugged and taken one.

It had made his eyes water with the failed effort of not coughing, and the sudden rush of nicotine made him dizzy. Nonplussed, she’d stood there, flicking the ash from the end of her own cigarette (she still hadn’t taken a drag, Dean noticed), until he got his coughing under control and tried again.

To be honest, Dean couldn’t quite see what people liked about it, especially with the splitting headache he’d ended up with once he finished. But he was back the next day, and this time he and Natasha had passed a single cigarette back and forth, which was sort of like kissing to someone who had never kissed someone before. Dean didn’t cough this time, or at least not much — the taste of the paper and the smoke and the hint of strawberry lip balm combined with the head rush and, for the first time in a long time, Dean felt like he finally had something in his life under control.

Then Natasha had kissed him, and he learned that passing a cigarette back and forth was nothing like kissing.

It wasn’t until he was fifteen that he smoked again. He and Sammy had stopped in a convenience store and on a whim, Dean asked for a pack of Camels at the register. The cashier hadn’t even batted an eye, and added it to the items on the counter. Slightly exhilarated with the sense of having gotten away with it, Dean shoved them into his pocket before Sammy could see.

It was, however, difficult to get away with such things for long.

“These yours?” Dad had asked grimly, tossing the half-empty pack onto the bed next to Dean one morning.

“Yeah,” Dean replied haughtily, looking Dad square in the face.

Dad set his jaw. His features lent themselves to an impressive glower, one that could still set a tiny corner of Dean’s stomach to quailing. “That’s your last. It’s too expensive of a habit. We can’t afford it.”

And that was it. Dad had shouldered his bag and stalked out of the motel room. It had actually taken Dean a few moments for him to yell after him, “Oh, and we can afford that?” and jab a finger at the empty beer cans on the dinette table, but it was too late for Dad to hear this rejoinder. That was probably for the best.

It had been Sammy who raised the objections that actually mattered, walking back to the motel from school one day as Dean casually lit a cigarette from his rapidly dwindling pack. “Those’re gonna turn your lungs black,” he’d said hesitantly, as though not sure he should be objecting to anything Dean did.

Dean shrugged. “Don’t believe everything they teach you in school.”

“You’re gonna get cancer,” Sammy had pressed.

At that, Dean had shaken his head ruefully. “Do you really think I’m gonna live long enough for that to be a problem?”

Stricken, Sammy closed his mouth and focused on the sidewalk in front of them, switching to the upwind side of Dean. Dean pretended not to notice.

But Dad was right, of course; what money they had was too precious to waste on cigarettes, especially after what Dean began referring to in his head as “Dad’s liquor levy.” The pack of Camels had been his last.

At least, until Sammy left.

He hadn’t been Sammy for a while, then; he’d been Sam, the name shortened when he’d sprouted some eight inches in a matter of months and then just didn’t stop. Before Dean could turn around twice his kid brother was taller than him, and smarter than him, and — well —  _better_  than him. And he proved that, in a diatribe of cutting words that had ended with him storming from the motel and Dean following him in the car, intending to bring him back to face the music but instead…

Instead, Dean drove him to the bus station. Because Sammy — Sam —  _was_  better than this. Dean knew it, and Sam knew it.

Alone, driving aimlessly, taking whatever turns were easiest at the time, Dean ended up at a dive bar. It had darts and pull tabs and three beers on tap, three more in the bottle, and any whiskey Dean wanted so long as he wanted Jack. He went with a beer and as the bartender slid it across the counter, Dean glanced to the side and saw the pack of cigarettes distending the shirt pocket of the man next to him.

“Hey,” he said, and his voice sounded hoarse, “think you could float me a smoke?”

The man shrugged and handed him a cigarette. “You need a light?”

Dean laughed. “Nah. I got one.” Three, actually. And matches. A whole pocket full. The joke was funny only to him, but he didn’t care. The lighter was a green plastic Bic, flimsy and already scratched, but it did the job. He only barely managed not to cough, muscles remembering what this was like, and he settled onto his stool and into himself to cultivate that special thoughtless hum within his skull, his solace from everything bad that happened to him.

It wasn’t difficult to make the jump from tobacco to marijuana, though pot had a fifty-fifty chance of making him unreasonably paranoid — he was paranoid often enough above the influence that it wasn’t something he welcomed recreationally. And he dropped acid once. Once was enough to ensure he never did it again. He saw fucked up stuff aplenty without assistance.

He technically had access to all manner of other pharmaceutical playthings, and he wasn’t sure what made him shy away from them. Maybe it was the feeling that he needed to be alert, and not dull his instincts. Maybe he was just a coward, and the idea of messing with his conceptions freaked him out. Or maybe it was the memory of eleven-year-old Sammy, grown pale at the thought of his big brother convinced he wouldn’t live long enough to reap what he’d sown.

So cigarettes and beer it was. Whiskey, too, once he acquired the taste for it. Dad would frown in disapproval, but say nothing, when Dean would slide into the passenger’s seat smelling of smoke - the one time Dean had dared to light up in the car, Dad had pulled over so quickly Dean had choked, and the glare he’d delivered got his message across perfectly. There was no smoking in the Impala. And once the Impala was his, Dean understood. The Impala…it was family. Home — or the closest thing to a home he’d had in decades. And home shouldn’t be sullied with vices and poor attempts at coping with the inevitable.

The fifth night after Dad dropped off the edge of the map, Dean paced the narrow space in the motel room, hand moving to his mouth in a reflexive motion even though the fingers were empty, and it dawned on him that he was devoting more energy to wanting a cigarette than to thinking about how to find Dad.

This wasn’t going to be solved if he was a trembling mess. He knew, painfully vividly, just how easy it was for him to sink into a coping mechanism and never come up for air. He’d nearly done it a dozen times, nearly gone under just like Dad did, to surface the next morning and do it again, and again —

He needed to get his head straight. He needed someone better than who he’d let himself turn into.

The breaking and entering wasn’t difficult, and the fighting was nothing new. Dean felt his mouth widen in a smile at the easy familiarity of it.

“Easy, Tiger.”


End file.
